About Me

Matthew Freeman is a Brooklyn based playwright with a BFA from Emerson College. His plays include THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR, REASONS FOR MOVING, THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE AMERICANS, THE WHITE SWALLOW, AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, THE MOST WONDERFUL LOVE, WHEN IS A CLOCK, GLEE CLUB, THAT OLD SOFT SHOE and BRANDYWINE DISTILLERY FIRE. He served as Assistant Producer and Senior Writer for the live webcast from Times Square on New Year's Eve 2010-2012. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to Gamespy, Premiere, Complex Magazine, Maxim Online, and MTV Magazine. His plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., New York Theatre Experience, and Samuel French.

Monday, March 14, 2011

It's really not that complicated

Listen.

Not all things are properly valued by the market, therefore we should not let market principles dictate the behavior of all things. It's not that complicated. Economics is a single lens through which to view the world, and it's a lens based on efficiency and production. It's central principles are not beauty or truthfulness or even, necessarily, usefulness.

Could we please, then, discuss journalism and government and the arts on their own terms - in terms of what they exist for, which is not, at their core, to turn a profit? It should be our goal to try to remove or reduce, as best we can, market influences on those things so that they can more closely align with their central tenets; not to move them as much as possible into the private sector, simply to avoid paying taxes.

6 comments:

thank you so much for writing this. you've captured my exasperation perfectly. if i hear one more person comparing government to either a household budget or a business i'm going to lose my fucking mind.

i do think we bear some responsibility for people thinking that arts organizations should run like businesses, namely that we (well not really "we" because i don't, but you know what i mean) keep using that vocabulary and way of thinking to make our decisions. If you treat the nonprofit as simply an alternate way of creating revenue, you kinda reap what you sow.

There is this increasing tendency to see the humanities and humanistic values as a luxury that either is, or should be limited to the economic elite-- to a point that even when we make the case for the arts and humanities without recourse to either business or home economics models, we are often arguing with regards to secondary utilitarian benefits, i.e. the cognitive development of students as opposed to the arts, without addressing the meaning of the arts and the humanities.

Could we please, then, discuss journalism and government and the arts on their own terms - in terms of what they exist for, which is not, at their core, to turn a profit?

It pains me to say this, but you're sounding unAmerican. In fact, you're starting to sound like a pinko commie sympathizer. I've forwarded this blog post to Homeland Security for further investigation.

No, were Comrade Freeman were a real communist he'd be insisting that journalism, government and the arts serve the revolutionary proletariat, and that the metaphysical ideals of truth, justice, and beauty that these institutions pursue are no more than bourgeois ideology. In short, Comrade Freeman, like all counter-revolutionaries will be put up against the wall when the revolution comes.